Whether looking for new business opportunities or servicing existing clients and stakeholders, as a company, you’re going to have to travel to maintain and grow your business. Business travel is an important facet of corporate existence, and any travel itinerary will by default incur business expenses.
However, most organisations still use archaic manual methods like physical binders or generic spreadsheet editors like Excel to manage their T&E (travel & entertainment expenses), either because they’re unaware of newer solutions or because they’re intimated by the migration process – which is usually far more straightforward than one might assume.
Here are 5 major travel related problems that most companies face:
Poor data visibility and accuracy
Using manual or obsolete IT systems to record, track and predict travel costs leaves finance teams struggling to ensure data accuracy.The lack of visibility can lead to mismanagement of budgets and costs spiralling way out of control.
Inefficient processes
Expenses need to be reported correctly and within a certain time-frame. This helps ensure that vouchers are dealt with while they’re new and fresh in memory and employees are consequently reimbursed promptly. Yet, employees in over two-thirds of all companies globally, send paper receipts to their finance departments. Similarly, over 50% of all organisations reimburse employees via cheque. These processes make it difficult for employees to file their expenses and predict reimbursement cycles, which leads to employee frustration and drop in morale.
High processing costs
Most organisations are not aware of the costs associated with expense monitoring and processing.Using a expense claim processing solution like Zento significantly reduces these costs. At Zento, we’ve reduced expense-processing costs for companies by over 30%!
Increasing travel and entertainment spend
Companies beginning to branch out globally will find that T&E expense column rapidly growing. Managing this increase in overall travel and expense spend is a challenge for growing companies, To add to this, the lack of visibility and accuracy makes it difficult for businesses to control unnecessary spending.With Zento, you’ll have peace of mind when you drill down expenses by department/trip/job profile/employee/etc. – giving you the ability to benchmark & compare reports and accordingly create traveling cost estimates and budgets.
Enforcing travel policies
Finally, a chaotic expense management process makes it difficult for finance teams to check whether expenses fall outside the corporate travel policy. Expense management solutions like Zento allow you to define policies in detail on the system itself, so expenses are automatically dealt with or flagged accordingly.
We know that corporate T&E Expenses can be major outgoing, but they need to be incurred. The best thing to do is reduce the clutter and ambiguity associated with this entire expense category. The key challenge is to control this spending all while supporting the traveller who, after all, is helping extend and enhance business operations.
Using a solution like Zento will help optimize this entire routine. If you’d like to learn more about Zento, do get in touch with us.